Black Like Me
by John Howard Griffin
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Book Summary Information
Author: John Howard GriffinEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-05-06
ISBN: 0451208641
Number of pages: 208
Publisher: NAL Trade
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780451208644
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of Black Like Me
Book Review: A Pioneer of Covert Participant Observation
Summary: 5 Stars
The author was born and raised in Texas, went to France to study psychiatry, and became embroiled in World War II while working with the French insurgents against the Nazi-installed sham government there. His insurgent work became known to the Gestapo and he had to "leave France in a hurry". He joined the Army Air Force as an Intelligence Officer, was badly wounded twice, and suffered from temporary blindness. He underwent a spiritual conversion and became a Catholic.
He returned to Texas and pondered doing covert participant observation on racism in the Deep South employing his skills developed through his experiences in the French Resistance: "For years the idea had haunted me, . . . If a white man became a Negro in the Deep South, what adjustments would he have to make? What is it like to experience discrimination based on skin color, something over which one has no control? . . . How else except by becoming a Negro could a white man hope to learn the truth?"
Indeed, Griffin made a sound case for the benefits of covert participant observation as a method of sociological enquiry. "The Southern Negro will not tell the white man the truth. He long ago learned tht if he speaks a truth unpleasing to the white, the white will make life miserable for him", he explained. People behave differently when they know they are being studied. Through covert particpant observation, it was possible for Griffin to experience what goes on, to see who or what is involved, to note when and where things happen, how they occur, and why.
With the help of a doctor, he darkened his skin in order to pass as a Negro in order to experience white hostility towards blacks: "The transformation was total and shocking . . . who is this large, bald Negro"?, he asked.
"In the bus station lobby . . . She answered rudely and glared at me with such loathing I knew I was receiving what the Negroes call 'the hate stare'. It was my first experience with it. . . I realized I had done nothing - my color offended her".
A pioneer of the growing sociological field of covert participant observation, Griffin's own experiences as a Negro in the Deep South are repeated in this volume "in all its crudity and rawness". Griffin provides a beacon in which other ethnographers might frame covert particpant observation research and illuminates some of the obstacles and dilemmas they might expect to encounter along the way. "It traces the changes which occur to heart and body and intelligence when a so-called first-class citizen is cast on the junkheap of second-class citizenship", he said.
This book should be read along with Jack Douglas's "Investigative Social Research" and Erving Goffman's "The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life".
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